


Su Cuy'gar

by countessofbiscuit



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Republic Commando Series - Karen Traviss, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alliance Politics, Bickering, Bounty Hunters, F/M, Honorable Mention: Fenn Shysa, Hope, Mandalore, Mandalorian Fetts, Past Hurt/Present Comfort, Rebels Compliant, Return of the Jedi, Survival, Yielding at the Edges, coming home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-01-26 21:34:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21380920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/countessofbiscuit/pseuds/countessofbiscuit
Summary: It would be a salvage of magnificent proportions, said the barkeep, if you didn’t mind the reek of broiled Hutt. The bounty hunter did mind. But she waited all the same, nursing what passed for tihaar on Tatooine, for the first scavengers to return from across the Dune Sea. Sandcrawlers were always worth a rifle and she had nowhere in particular to be.The Jawas wouldn’t discuss the terrain sensors or warped hull plates, but would she trade for these charred reliefs in the Huttese style? Or this set of humanoid armor, with a sarlacc’s half-digested meal still warm inside?She tried not to laugh as she parted with her bandolier and diamond stud. Bounty hunting was a capricious profession.
Relationships: Boba Fett/Bo-Katan Kryze
Comments: 11
Kudos: 54
Collections: Star Wars Rare Pairs Exchange 2019





	Su Cuy'gar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/gifts).

The bounty was old and the head that claimed it was older still. 

It was also inconclusive, ever since a Sep scientist in Keldabe had generated a very targeted anti-aging treatment—and a rogue Republic loyalist on Kamino had decommissioned himself in a flurry of leaked remote-access codes. A bioscan would be equally useless, except to stress that this Fett was close to death. 

So the Mand’alor pocketed the puck that said this might cost her considerable credits and called for the armor. The bounty hunter had no choice but to produce it. 

“Half-alive, half-price,” said the Mand’alor, who knew her beskar’gam.

The bounty hunter shrugged. “There’s always Shysa.” 

“He won’t thank you either. You’ve ruined his face.” 

“Sarlacc spit tends to do that. Spared his balls, though. He’ll still stud.”

With a slow nod from the Mand’alor, Fenn Shysa’s dream dynasty was stymied again, and the bounty hunter’s pockets deepened materially. Not bad for an afternoon’s afterthought in Mos Espa, and on a bounty the Guild considered expired. 

She was halfway out the chamber when a Protector sidestepped into her path. 

“You know, _beroya,_” came the Mand’alor’s silvery voice, “there’s an Imperial export ban on beskar.” 

The bounty hunter’s fingers tightened around the handle of the repulsorcrate. “Unrefined, yes.” 

“You can argue that point with our customs authority. They make special deals for the Black Sun.” 

The Protector powered up his carbine, eloquently introducing himself and his terms of negotiation.

“You know, _mand’alor,_” said the bounty hunter, “I gave you first refusal. It’s not exactly best practice.”

“Because you knew Shysa wouldn’t be good for it. That was smart. Trying to sell that armor on to some fucking coreworlder won’t be.” 

Every hand in the room twitched for their blasters. That wasn’t force-sensitivity, it was pure professional intuition, so the bounty hunter tried to appeal to what pacts there were between insurgents and opportunists. “Sabine said things had changed. She didn’t say you’d become just as much of a bully as the Empire.” 

“We adapt. We survive. Now get out of here, Onyo, before I radically renegotiate our deal.” 

The bounty hunter left and the beskar’gam stayed. Its green and yellow paint was flaked and chipped in places, and it stank like strill’s bile, but it was otherwise unspoilt. It had fared much better than its owner, who was hurried away to the medbay before he became one very expensive corpse. 

They had only one tank in the mines underneath the old governor’s compound, and the Mand’alor worried a footpath around it, studying the burned body of the man she’d bought in the unnatural light. Many joined her in her revolutions, a silent cavalcade of the curious and the incredulous—and the inimical, too. It was the way of the Mand’alor to bury the blade, but others still held them warm in their palms. So she kept vigil over an uncertain enemy, wondering what to do with him. 

“You followed his father,” said the Mand’alor, to one whose loyalty counted for more than most. 

“And now I follow you,” Fenn Rau replied. 

“And if he took up the saber?” 

The corners of his mouth twitched. “If he could get it from you …” 

“If I gave it to him."

They halted as one, and Rau’s blue-eyed wonderment finally fell away from the tank. “You’d spend such credits only to humor Keldabe anyway?” 

“I spent those credits to give Fett a choice. And to give us a chance at keeping a hard-won truce.” 

Mandalorians were egalitarian; they were also dangerously romantic. Bored of breaking against the Empire to no avail, they might come up with any reason to break against each other again, along the same old fault lines. She could stem some violence if an upstart Fett decided to reach for Tarre’s legacy; she could do nothing if Shysa and the northern clans had Fett by the sack and decided she could keep her relic and her glory, for the true Mand’alor had come home at last. 

“It’d be a priceless holo. Nothing more,” Rau said finally, looking at her in earnest. “The only honor would be in handing it back. He has much more to gain than heirloom valor.” 

“Indeed.” 

Boba Fett was dar’manda and he wasn’t out of the maw yet. 

The med droids had rotated five times and the Mand’alor hadn’t left the compound once when he was finally drawn out of the bacta, wiped down, and carted to an empty room to make way for the casualties of the latest and last strike of the year on Sundari. 

It was another rotation more before he opened his eyes. They grew wide and vexed as he glanced around, taking in his survival and his fresh defeat in one. Under the sheets, his hands fumbled around his groin. Poor shab’ika. More worried about his sack than his sight. He would be alright, then. 

“Your leg was broken and your ankle fractured,” the Mand’alor announced bluntly. She had never learnt to deal in pleasantries and Boba Fett wouldn’t appreciate them; he also wouldn’t appreciate a laundry list of injuries the bacta had taken care of, so she didn’t expound. “They’ve been reset, but you’ll be in the plexicast for a few days. Others needed the tank more than you.”

He slumped deeper into the pillow, his voice hoarse and flat. “I should have died.” 

“Don’t be pathetic. Do you know who I am?” 

His eyes flicked to her face a second time, more casually, perhaps comparing all the lines with all the years. She had bounties out too, even older than his, and more lucrative besides. The renegade daughter of Duke Kryze would have fetched a handsome credit, once upon a time. 

“Yes.” 

“Then you know under whose protection you find yourself. That makes three people with a vested interest in keeping you and your Fett-blessed balls away from Keldabe. Or whoever else might want them. Cheer up.” 

“Why? So you can publicly remove them with that off-brand laser sword of yours?”

“You get that out of a holonovel? Wait—” Bo-Katan sat back, holding up a finger “—you probably did. Because your father walked away from where I sit now and didn’t teach you a shabla thing.”

The tendons in his neck and forearms flexed, like he wanted to put some force behind what he said next, but was tempered by circumstance and fatigue. “He taught me enough about Death Watch.” 

Bo-Katan stood, reassured that he’d last the night at least. “That movement is over. We’ve moved on. Sorry we’ve been too busy to redecorate.”

Before she could leave, he asked abruptly, “Who collected?” 

“I think professional courtesy demands I don’t say.” She plucked a pistol from a holster and tossed it to him. “They aren’t here, anyway. You won’t be disturbed. But feel free to shoot anyone foolish enough to enter.”

The next morning brought the Mand’alor back to Fett’s bedside, armed with breakfast and renewed patience from a few hours’ sleep. “Haili cetare,” she said, depositing the bowl into his lap. “Eat up.” 

Fett’s petulance had only worsened, embittered no doubt by his first sleepless night pissing through a tube. The sleeplessness was his own stubborn fault; she’d help him with the tube, if he’d unclench a little. To that end, Bo-Katan sat down on the bed. Close enough to feel the warmth of his big thigh through the sheet. Close enough to make him think twice about doing anything stupid. 

“You need your strength,” she said.

“Why. So I can _escape?_”

“If you feel like it. But as my guest, you could just walk out the front door once your legs heal. You’ll need to eat something first.”

The mattress seemed to soften with him a little. “Where am I?” 

“You’re on Concordia, in the old stronghold of House Vizsla. And you’re on the third floor, in the northwest wing, if you want to know. We have no spaceports, and only one lane the Empire isn’t watching, but we get no tourists or Alliance quacks, and we’re not nearly as interesting to the Empire as Mandalore. They’re not on planet, by the way.” 

The honesty disarmed him and he shrugged heavily, emoting like a fellow buckethead at least. “Not my problem.”

“Really? Your last job for them didn’t end so well.”

“Wasn’t their job.”

“Whose then?”

“Jabba’s. And it ended fine. The mistake was hanging around for the show. He was trying to kill—” 

Information was expensive. And it was almost the only thing of value Boba Fett had left to his name. He clammed up, and Bo-Katan waited with a raised brow for him to grapple with the relatively poor currency of his news. 

“He’s dead, you know. Jabba,” she bartered carefully. “So if you tell me he was trying to kill the Princess of Alderaan and failed, I might kiss you.”

“He was trying to kill a Jedi.”

It came out in a rush, disturbing the dust of her vanity but buoying her spirits. That surprised her: Mand’alor the Bitterborn, rejoicing at more jetiise in the galaxy. “Oh?” 

“The Rebel Skywalker.” 

“So you’ve seen him.”

“Yup.”

“Is he a fake like they say?” 

“His lightsaber is real enough. And someone died giving me that name.” 

She remembered seeing Tano’s master once, all floppy-haired, holoromance hero. Exactly the sort to leave the byproducts of an illicit affair or two in his wake—if it wasn’t all Alliance propaganda. 

Fett read the reflection on her face well. “He’s the right age,” he added. The first war orphan had done the math on the last. 

“Well. The war made strange bedfellows.” It still did. And it made the galaxy very, very small.

Fett poked at the bowl’s contents, stiffly changing the subject. “You bored or something? Don’t you have a rebellion of your own to run?”

“Who would you prefer? We’re short on droids, and the medics are busy, but there’s a small army of Mandalorians down there who all have something to say to you. Some would lift you up just to kiss your shebs. Others would like to drop-kick you into the nearest shaft and toss a det in after. Good luck figuring out which is which.” 

He upended the bowl to demonstrate the bizarre physics of the breakfast she’d provided. “I’ll take anyone who can bring better food. What the kriff is this.” 

“Ratmeal.” 

_“What.”_

“Dry rations in water. Old Grand Army stock. Kind of like you,” she smirked.

He set it down on the bedside table in protest. She returned it to him. “You’ll thank me when you’re not shitting the bed.” 

“No I won’t.”

He wasn’t grateful, but he persevered through the porridge, his face coiling with every bite like a churlish child—a child who still said things like ‘kriff’ and liked being a petty contrarian. Bo-Katan stayed, talking at him more than with him. She talked of the Empire—of the Coup—of the clans scattered to the stars—of the very important distinction between _Vizla_ and _Vizsla_ that mattered to nobody but themselves—of many things he ought to have known but didn’t. And he seemed to warm to her, his reticence drawing back at the corners, bit by stubborn bit. It had probably been a long time since he was alone with a Mandalorian—peacefully, at least. Perhaps not since Jango’s time. 

“How many Mando bounty hunters have you met?” she asked, eternally curious about the demographics of the diaspora. 

“Dunno. I stick to my parsecs, they stick to theirs.” 

“You also keep the worst clientele. Guess that naturally thins the field.” 

“I only do odd jobs for syndicates, bureaucracies, and darksiders,” he said, one hairless brow raised. A wrinkle of judgement. “I’ve never taken up arms with them.” 

“Have you ever taken up arms for anyone but yourself?”

He made no reply. Instead, he folded himself back into silent self-pity as his bodily needs became apparent. He glanced furtively between the vacc-tube within arm’s reach, and the door far beyond the bed, where he correctly assumed the fresher to be. 

Bo-Katan stood and jerked the sheet from over his stiff legs. “You can live with the gall of accepting help, or you can stay in this bed like a sick laphound. I’ll let you decide what your father would have chosen.” 

He suffered her assistance without a word. Wrapping her arms around his torso, she held him steady as he worked himself from the bed. The thick muscles in his chest flexed beneath her hold. Her face flushed hot and deep as she anticipated the moment when her forearm would find the small pea of his nipple, and nothing could keep her pulse from racing when it did. The most inveterate clans bowed to a Mand’alor who was still fourteen at heart, mooning over the silliest features of man. 

Fett’s hand stopped at the hem of his tunic when they finally reached the fresher. 

“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” Bo-Katan blurted out, unwilling to look up and betray herself. She joined in his indignity by pretending to be unbalanced by his weight and gripped his shirt harder. “Don’t twist your flak straps.” 

She didn’t look. She didn’t have to. The dark shape in her peripheral answered her curiosity enough. 

And it was still there later, when she closed her eyes to put another night between her and the infamous man she’d bought. 

Fett was much more content the next morning: all broad, sleep-sound breaths against the pillow, with a placidity on his brown face that hadn’t been there in the bacta. One limp hand had fallen away from the blaster on his stomach; in his other lay the carved veshok paw that she’d lent him for the itch. 

He would be even happier when he awoke to find his armor returned, fresh from a long biocarbonate bath. Waiting quietly, she turned his helmet over in her hands. She’d picked it apart and restored the interior as well she could. Slipping it on would be a gross invasion of privacy, but she thought about it—thought about wearing his face as she passed the time with a hand down her flightsuit. It had been … some time. And he was pitching one healthy tent. 

A flurry of motion under his eyelids and Fett was with the waking again. He jerked forward, reaching for the bucket over the blaster, and stuffed it on hastily. She smiled inwardly as he was reunited with a part of himself in a scene of minute head tilts and faint whirring noises as the rangefinder bobbed up and down. She could almost hear the click of his teeth as he switched displays. 

“Thank you,” he said finally, pushing around the silence in the room. 

Bo-Katan nodded. He had been forced into lidless intimacy: who knew what it would take to earn another face-to-face. He could use some eyebrows, but the sarlacc’s scars distinguished his handsome Fett features. She hoped to look upon them again. 

His head went very still. He was waiting for something, and she could guess what. 

“All long-range transmissions are blocked,” she said.

“Because I’m your prisoner.” 

“Because the Empire monitors transceiver traffic. And I don’t want all your pulls for holoporn to get flagged.” Easily baited, his visor rounded slowly to face her, and she needled him some more. “You want easy nookie here, you stretch your interpersonal side like the rest of us.” 

She left him with that thought and began pulling his plates from the crate, one by one, to array them against the wall. All the old bells and whistles had been recalibrated, and she told him so in a foreign tongue, frustrating and motivating him in equal measure. He would have to retrieve the parts and test them himself. 

Drawing out a chest plate, she pointed idly at the sheaf sigil. “I understand the Fett farm is under clone management nowadays.”

“Bully for them,” he replied, taking it square on his born-bent-out-of-shape nose rather more than she intended. 

“Do you even know what this means?” she demanded of the True Mandalorian idiot. 

“It was my dad’s.” 

A simple, artless answer; there could be no arguing with it. If he honored his father, he honored the Journeyman’s ways, and their legacy lived on as best it could in these changed times. What he remembered, he rendered eternal. 

Bo-Katan considered herself schooled, and moved on to another lesson. 

It was sunny season in Sundari. The starlight was oppressive and making a run on the biome now would be wasteful. Their shields just burned out and burned up fuel, and the citizens were always more interested in helping the limping garrison repair the damage than knocking the infrastructure right out from under their Imperial boots. Disaffection was like a plague among the vulnerable; they had learned better than to stoke it. 

So they waited. And the Mand’alor talked and walked with the son of one whose patience was infamous. Born of one ba’slan shev’la and nursed through another: a true Mandalorian life cycle, if a little singular at the start. 

Fett regained his strength using a secondhand Republic hoverhold, moving like a waiter burdened by a banqueting tureen as they ventured further into the compound each day. Halls and corridors fell silent upon their approach, and not just because he liked walking around in half-gam: flightsuit arms tied around his waist, sleeveless undershirt exposed, but helmeted like a coreward advertisement for lazy Mando fancy dress. She went everywhere with him at first, wearing the saber conspicuously on her belt, within his easy reach. And if any old kyr’tsade still had grit up their plates about Jango that they hadn’t tried to take out on one of his billion offshoots, she’d have their heads. The blade stopped here, with her. 

Within a fortnight, his casts were off, and he took his first cautious steps into the crisp Concordian air. He searched the sky on instinct, charting the system on his display, getting his bearings. Bo-Katan, who wore no helmet here, among her people, followed his gaze and wondered which stars he steered his heart to. 

“Ka’ra,” he said, unstilling the quiet. 

“You’ve been picking stuff up.” She was glad for it, and had been relieved to see him taken in by others in the enclave. The goran especially esteemed him highly. Somehow, Fett had gotten wind of Bo-Katan’s accident trying to restore the touchy Czerka bolt-on on one of his gauntlets—the accident that had sent much of the goran’s hair up in flames—and he’d spent an entire day silently sweeping the forge of metal shavings and soldering together basic underplates from a crate of spare wires. Whom the goran favored, none could touch. Bo-Katan worried less about whom he might bump into on his daily walks. 

Fett shook his head. “My dad used to say that every time we punched through Kamino’s cloud cover. Said the stars were fallen heroes. He never said whose—Mandalore’s, I guess.” 

“_Ka’ra_ is Mandalorian concept, yes. A very ancient one,” she said as she stepped up beside him. “But we couldn’t boast enough fallen kings to fill even a corner of the night sky—much less good ones. He was probably right to leave it vague.” 

Mandalore hovered above them, a pale and looming crescent. “See—there is my sister,” she said, pointing to it. “More star-like the further you get, to tell the truth.” She drew her finger across the sky to a bright, faraway dot, sinking low in the thick horizon: Kalevala. “And my other sister, always gone too soon. The next Mand’alor is up there somewhere, too, kicking about from star to star with the Rebellion. I think about all of them and many more when I look up. I’d say there’s room for your father, too.” 

She supposed she’d just gotten spiritual with him, and maybe a little sentimental too, but it was funny how quickly the swell of his shoulder close to her chin brought her back dirtside—like the whole galaxy was forgettable, just a joke, and the only thing that really mattered was Fett’s brown skin and how warm it might be under her touch.

His helmet ducked down at her, like he’d noticed her staring. “You’ve picked a rebel as your heir? Seems chancy.”

Bo-Katan shrugged, ready to have this talk if he was. “Some people think I should pick a bounty hunter.”

Fett didn’t make any reply. He just turned towards the compound, motioning for her to lead the way back inside, where supper waited in the mess. But he cornered her in the door later, when she turned to leave him for the night. He stopped her with a brief hand on her waist, and arrested the momentum of her life altogether when he removed his helmet. 

“I don’t want it, by the way,” he said abruptly. 

She felt foolish at the rise and fall of her own expectation. “What?”

“Your sword.” 

That was good, for she had set her heart on handing it over peacefully to Wren—to show it something it had never seen before, even in the long age of Vizsla. 

But it wasn’t what her heart craved most, in that moment. 

“What do you want?” she asked.

It was all hushed hope between them now. Though Fett wouldn’t admit to a lack of anything, his eyes flicked to the window. Then they flicked back to where his hand had touched her, lingering overlong but distantly, before they turned to the piles of circuitry naked on his bed. 

Bo-Katan wouldn’t hover beneath him in the doorway like this, holding a paramour’s desperate breath. 

She would return to her room, return to her senses under a cold shower, and prepare to call in the favor of a lifetime. Maybe two. 

Concordia, strip-mined and regularly strafed, had a lot of problems—not as many as Concord Dawn, that backwards breadbasket of the system, but enough. And Concord Dawn at least had their proud Protector tradition; Concordia had a diminished population after most of the ruling house fucked off coreward during the Shadow Occupation, taking with them their investors, their heavy machinery, and their pureblood strill packs. 

Among the problems was a serious ecological mess in the southwestern quadrant, under the management of one of Fett’s brood. One of the souped-up first editions. 

“A’den. You old akk,” Bo-Katan greeted the autumnal face under a Corellian spacer’s cap. A strill pup was gnawing at his thick fingers. 

“Chief. Long time, no call. I like it that way, you know.” 

“I do. I’ll keep this brief. There’s a ship that needs tracking down. A Firespray-31—”

“—31-class patrol craft that belonged to a little shit who drowned in sand? You’re too late. My brothers are already on it.” 

Bo-Katan’s face grew pinched and hot. “Shysa put a bounty on that, too?” 

“No, it’s just a swish ship and Ordo’s gotten all sentimental in his protracted middle age.”

She could work with that. Ordo was a noble soul, defacto alor’ad around Keldabe, and always willing to break bread. Especially if it was sweet. “Sentimental enough that he’d give it back to the little shit?” she asked. 

A’den’s hand went still between the rows of teeth. “What’s that supposed to mean.” 

“Bring me the ship first. And remember to comm ahead. No ship, no clearance, no funny business. I’ve got some trigger-happy gunners here who haven’t had an AA lightshow in weeks.”

“Ah, don’t tempt us, chief.” 

A week later, no more, Bo-Katan stood before a squad of clones: A’den and his brother Mereel, and two of their myriad adopted grunts. One sported a motley of commando plates and soft Imperial dugs, like a grungy, provocative scavenger. The other had gone full native with a set of red and grey beskar’gam that he wore shockingly well beneath a stylized high-and-tight. Between the Republic-issued durasteel hands of one, and the rattled-bucket badge on the other, she figured turnabout was fair play, and very, very mandokarla.

“You’re the closest thing to aliit he’s got, but he’s not to be bundled away to your little retirement compound,” she declared. They nodded impatiently, buy’ce stuffed under their arms. “And _don’t_ scare him.”

They scared him, exuberant strill and all, bumrushing the room and waking their lost vod’ika like they wanted a shot to the head. 

“Almost didn’t recognise you without your face down the fresher,” Mereel said with a playful punch to Boba’s shoulder.

“I would, and we’ve never even met,” said the clone named Corr. “You’ve got asshole-Alpha-complex written all over your baby mug.”

Boba remained entrenched in the bed—and not just because he was pinned by two-thirds of a strill. There had been no time to reach for his bucket. Though his face was gummed up in places by scar tissue, she was struck by his relative youthfulness. These clones had all gotten a healthy hit of whatever it was that halted their accelerated ageing, but nothing could change the fact that they'd been playing hide-and-seek with droid snipers before Boba was out of diapers. 

Still, they were all younger than she was; nothing new, but Boba made her feel it for the first time in a while. 

“Well look at this fine Fett family reunion. All makes and models,” said Fi, the winsome commando. “Shysa will be gutted he missed it. Someone should take a holo.”

“You can tell Shysa we missed all his tail-end bombers in the last run,” griped Bo-Katan. “I do notice these things.”

“Why do you think he’s left the Chosen One here unbothered and sent his most charming ambassadors?” replied Mereel. He relieved Boba of his untouched tisane and gave it to the strill. “He keeps the Alliance buttered, since you never let Rau and his fancy flyboys off the leash anymore.” 

“The Princess will have Shysa on a leash when this is all over, if he’s not careful,” Bo-Katan said. 

“Ooh, no need to excite him, boss,” chirped Fi. 

“Eh, let him angle for it. Then he’d be too busy fathering sprogs with his royal missus to think about polishing up Boba here for the job,” Mereel said, scrubbing his little brother's head, where the curls had not yet returned. 

Boba absorbed the attention with all the cheer of a half-drowned tooka, his mood growing darker with the rising day. They tried to engage him as best they could when he refused to speak more than one word every five minutes. Finally, they released him so he could go to the fresher. And if Bo-Katan hadn't known what was waiting for him in the hanger, the black look he dropped on her as he stalked past her chair might have curdled her blood. 

“Hey, vod,” Corr demanded an hour later, clanking his fist against the fresher door. “You done? I’d like to go myself sometime this century.” 

“Find another one,” Boba said. 

Mereel pushed Corr out of the way. “Why don’t you come out and take a walk with us. We’ve got something to show you.” 

“No.” 

“Extracting you from this fresher won’t be SpecOps finest hour, but we’ll do it.”

“Okay,” came the voice of juvenile disinterest.

They’d actually started signalling among themselves to stack up, when Bo-Katan stepped up to the door, rolling her eyes. “Boba. They’ve brought something of your father’s.” 

After a bit of shuffling on both sides, the door slid open. Boba slunk out, ignoring his brothers but looking at her with a face full of silent entreaty. And when he followed Bo-Katan out of the room, he seemed to forget all about reaching for the hoverhold to steady his way. 

They walked to processional chorus of clones greeting and joshing other clones that they encountered in the compound’s corridors. Boba tried to maintain the uncurious and sour facade. Bo-Katan was almost grinning herself to see it melt as their destination dawned on him. He even picked up the pace. 

_Slave-1_ lay squat in the corner like a dead beetle. But Boba ran his hands along it like the ship was made of Perliemian marble. Home had come to him. 

Bo-Katan and the others held back, watching the reunion from afar, until the clones' army appetites got the better of them. She waved Boba over; it spoke to his equanimity that he actually complied. 

“Welcome to the clan, vod’ika,” Mereel told him simply, bumping gauntlets. “You ever want to come to Keldabe, you’d never buy another drink. Shysa’s orders. You might get a few smashed over your head too, but that comes with the territory.”

Then his brothers swooped out as quickly as they’d swooped in, making for the compound’s mess to catch up on system gossip, and probably tap into the veshok casks more than was good for them. 

“There was a time when no one would've gone to so much trouble just to let me go,” Boba said to Bo-Katan quietly, as they watched the clones depart. 

“Frustrating Shysa was worth the credits,” she shrugged, feeling a little funny now that her job here was done. It came out a little more bitter than sweet. “But those men have always been worth more to Mandalore than you.” 

Bo-Katan walked away, and hoped that tinkering with his ship would stop that hard truth from ringing too much in his ears. 

That night, Fett decamped from the northwest corridor into his ship, where he lingered for weeks, pottering around doing odd jobs, waiting for stars knew what. A place in the next Sundari strike formation? A celebratory raiding party from Keldabe? Some augural star alignment? She’d been generous with the fuel and supremely generous with the jump coordinates. Yet he remained, cagey with his freedom. 

As the nights closed in on Bo-Katan and she saw less of him, she became bothered by the other possibility: that he might wish to try his hand against her, after all. He had almost perished; it would be harder to hold his battle cheap. 

That, or his empty pockets presented a problem he couldn’t ignore. 

Bo-Katan stood at her bedroom window, staring half-asleep again at a starscape that held no answers, when someone knocked on her door. 

She opened it to find Fett, barefaced and casual, flightsuit arms knotted around his firm waist.

“Hi,” he said, a little strangely. A little stiffly, like he was stalling for the right words to come. 

She spat out her dejection before it could settle in her stomach. “You’re leaving?” she asked.

He stepped forward. “Soon. But I’m not finished here.” 

She scolded herself for not grabbing a vibroblade, or checking him for one, instead of ogling the grip of his undershirt over his broad chest. Or the swell of his naked arms. Or the sharp cut of his thick eyebrows. Bo-Katan tensed. She froze entirely when he came even closer—close enough that she caught a faceful of his warm breath when he began chanting in Mando’a. 

“Ba'jur bal beskar'gam, ara'nov, aliit, Mando'a bal Mand'alor, an vencuyan mhi.” 

Then he dropped to his knees. 

Bo-Katan’s blood ran fast and torrid, like someone had splashed hot tihaar between her ribs, to see his face down there. To hear what she think she heard. She almost didn’t let herself believe it. 

Her breath wobbled. “I hadn’t taken you for a romantic, Fett.”

Never breaking her gaze, he drew his big, rough fingers up the outside of her thighs. He hooked them into the tops of her briefs, rolling them down carefully until the Mand’alor was bare before him, her short curls still red as flame. Leaning forward, Fett buried his nose into them, mouth between her quaking legs, and licked slowly, deliberately up. 

“I’m not.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you "Bed" by Yeek for the beats, and to my awesome beta.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Su Cuy'gar](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24417301) by [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins)


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